j dick!?

jdick: “Hi, my name is jdick.”

Random Man: “J dig?”

“No, jdick. you know like dick.”

“Oh. I don’t think I can call you that.”

“Oh no don’t worry there is no sexual connotation- my last name is dickerson. Since jessica is such a common name it’s easier to remember jdick- you know like j-lo.”

“oh. Well I think I’ll just stick with calling you J.”

yeah, people call me jdick. In case you were wondering, I got the nickname from a fellow grocery store co-worker in 2001. At the local grocery store I worked at, we used a computerized credit system to purchase food and we used our signatures to verify our purchases. Well it used to take me forever to sign jessica dickerson and on the day I was sporting fresh j-lo braids (ha), my co-worker got fed up and she suggested that I start signing my name as jdick since I had j-lo braids. And she wanted me to start telling people to call me jdick since I had no other nickname prior to that one. Well it worked. I began to tell my co-workers and my friends in high school to start calling me jdick and they did. People love to call me jdick. It gives them an excuse to yell out ‘dick!’ However, some people don’t like to call me jdick. People like heterosexual men who are uncomfortable with their sexuality. For some reason they refuse to use the d-word to refer to me . “Oh no I can’t call a lady a ‘dick’ ” Well I am here to tell you that yes you can call me jdick and it should make no difference as to whether or not you refer to me as genitalia. All I’m saying is lets get over this whole gender binary thing.  jdick is not to be taken sexually. It is the combination of my two names. It is my nickname. Werd.

Holler.

The New Facebook: Subvertising

Just less than a week ago the website Facebook changed its appearance to a more sophisticated look (I think it’s more confusing, personally). It seems in the world of technology, everything is changing at a rapid pace. Unfortunately, the way advertisers target their consumers has not changed in the past century. Advertising today (as we should know) is used to create the false sense of need within the unaware consumer. The need to share the same normalcy as others is needed in order to fit into society because if one does not fit into society, then they are rejected from it and are left searching for that normalcy. Fortunately, there are people out there challenging the norm. Take this story for example. Inspired by the negative weight loss advertisements on Facebook, Teresa Valdez Klein redesigned them and turned them into positive body affirmation advertisements.

Here are examples of her ads that started running in April of 2008

The first ad she ran:

An original ad and her remake side by side:

Here’s what she had to say about her ad campaign:

“If you click it, it takes you to the Love Your Body Day website. I’m going to run the ad through April 7. I’ve set the maximum daily budget to the minimum of $5.00. I targeted it to single women between 18 and 30. I pirated the image of the Reubenesque Barbie doll from the Body Shop’s campaign in the late 90’s. Today, the ad had 12 clicks and 6,590 impressions.

If you like this idea, why not try it yourself. It’s relatively easy to set up an ad to run for a few days, you don’t need to spend more than $5.00 a day and you can reach thousands of people. If even a few people do this, we can reach a wider audience with the message that we’re all tired of seeing ads on Facebook that try to make us insecure about our bodies.”

This is awesome and wow, just a mere $5.00 to advertise. Just think, what if more people spent $5.00 on subvertising than on trashy magazines or dieting products? Get Inspired. Get Creative. I know I am.